Many Forces Impacting Business

Businesses have emerged from the era of “doing more with less” and have a renewed focus on growth. Yet pragmatic growth is top of mind as IT budgets tighten to free up funds for innovation that will fuel competitive advantage. As businesses prepare themselves for an increasingly litigious and regulated world, struggles emerge to comply with an increasing number of industry guidelines and federal mandates. In order to manage risk while enabling growth, companies must gain control over the mass of information being created, shared, and stored throughout the environment.

Overwhelming outlook for information
It’s all about information. Information is the intellectual property your business relies on to grow and it’s what must be managed in order to balance risk versus opportunity. The winners are the ones that can control the process by which information is created, delivered, and ultimately archived. Managing information has become the focal point of every CIO’s and CTO’s strategy. It’s well known that volumes of information (data, email, files, images, physical documents) are doubling every 18 months, and the ratio of backup data to source data is projected to be 20:1, with much of it not essential to daily operations.

Through it all, IT struggles with underutilized or overloaded systems that are unable to appropriately store and archive the status quo, let alone scale to keep pace with increasing volumes of information. In addition, IT finds it extremely difficult to respond to discovery requests, and implement the requirements and policies imposed by regulators as well as their own Legal department. This leaves little time to focus on the strategic issues as investigating and implementing innovations in virtualization and automation.

Rethinking information management
As unstructured data volumes and regulations increase, IT environments will only get more complex and daunting. The need to find and protect every bit of information across individual systems while executing against continuous legal requirements has changed the criteria every CIO and CTO must now use to evaluate their information management strategy.

Flexibility, scalability, and simplicity to manage the “unknown” are now the critical factors to consider. Today’s businesses require a single, scalable platform with tailored solutions that are sophisticated enough to handle robust environments, yet are easy to manage. An information management platform must:

• Integrate immediately within the most disparate of environments.
• Incorporate technology that is scalable enough to meet very large enterprise requirements, and satisfy business needs now and well into the future.
• Embrace all forms of information — structured and unstructured, digital and printed.
• Deliver best practices for information retention and ultrafast search that align IT
  with Legal processes for compliance, governance, and discovery.

Information Management from HP: Retain it. Retrieve it. Manage it.
HP, the world’s largest IT vendor and the sixth largest software company, is uniquely equipped to address these changing information management challenges. HP has undertaken a bold agenda to design the next-generation information management platform engineered to help you better manage your fast-growing information assets to contain costs, mitigate business risk, improve process alignment, and become more competitive. The only partner to offer a single, reliable platform and solutions, HP’s approach delivers easy-to-integrate, ready-to-grow information management. Our Information Management platform and solutions help organizations prepare for legal discovery and corporate governance in today’s regulated business climate, protect against data loss, and seize opportunities with information that is continuously available – where and when you need it.

This means organizations can focus on broader information retention and availability objectives – not simply storage and backup. Our highly scalable, fully integrated information management platform and solutions address the long-term preservation and retrieval of fixed content for regulatory compliance, electronic discovery, and storage optimization initiatives. And because the platform is pre-integrated, pretested, and factory-built on industry-standard systems and policy management software, it creates the most sophisticated foundation for scalable, flexible, and high-performance archiving.

As a result, businesses can be sure their critical information assets are always protected and easily accessible, regardless of time or archive size. We actively optimize and relocate information to significantly improve performance of business applications, and reduce costs while preserving historical records for retrieval on demand. And HP is the only company that enables a holistic information approach that spans all digital and physical information. Our printing and imaging leadership allows businesses to retain and retrieve your valuable contracts, agreements, drawings, images, and all other physical information regardless of format.

Grow the business cost effectively
IT organizations have historically borne a high cost and time burden from integrating off-the-shelf solutions from multiple vendors, especially when it comes to information management. This building-block approach, which requires manual integration and maintenance across individual components, has an adverse impact on resources and budget. A fully integrated platform that reduces costs by leveraging existing resources lets enterprises create a foundation for future growth and minimize the current pain associated with information management.

A single, scalable information retention portfolio that provides centralized, enterprise-wide archiving can also dramatically reduce operational and capital costs. In most cases, enterprises are storing the majority of their information on expensive, “tier 1” storage and server systems instead of deploying a true archiving strategy where old, yet critical information is relocated to, and retained on, a single platform. Information is often retained multiple times, in multiple places, which exponentially increases the volume of data as the number of documents increases. Duplication doesn’t end with just data and files, but also extends out to the processes and policies created and managed in every corner of the organization, requiring more time and effort to govern.

HP solves these headaches by bearing the burden of integration for you. We’ve pre-integrated and pre-tested our standards-built archiving platform so that enterprises can realize lower total cost of ownership. Our scalable, fully integrated platform and solutions give businesses the foundation for a long-term, centralized, multicontent enterprise archiving strategy. It will easily scale to meet explosive information growth without loss in archive performance or the high cost of overprovisioned yet underutilized storage. With an enterprise-class solution designed specifically to handle email, databases, files, printed information, and other emerging data types, our customers’ primary storage and systems are immediately optimized.

Mitigate the risk that threatens your business.
As businesses cope with growing pressures around compliance, governance, and legal discovery, many are unable to scale to meet increasing mandates or respond quickly to simultaneous litigations. As archives grow and fragment, IT is forced to redirect precious resources away from the business to help with litigation response, or hire expensive, external legal or IT consultants to augment manual search efforts, which introduces new costs. Any misalignment between Legal and IT can prevent the organization from complying with regulations or court mandates, creating an exposure to potential fines and penalties that far exceed the cost associated with proper information management. In fact, a well-known Wall Street investment bank was recently fined $29 million for failing to properly preserve email during several litigation and regulatory matters. [1]

Information Management from HP aligns IT and legal requirements and reduces costs. It gives enterprises a responsive, cost-effective e-discovery platform that automatically consolidates all information in a single, secure, searchable archive based on best practices in regulatory, governance, and data-retention requirements. HP’s innovative grid architecture enables search across billions of objects in seconds to retrieve just the information required to satisfy simultaneous legal discoveries. This significantly reduces the costs associated with e-discovery and lets businesses avoid fines and sanctions. Yet the savings are not limited to hard costs – valuable resources that are no longer consumed by manual discovery processes can be refocused on pressing business priorities.

Integrate the processes that free the business.
Silos of all kinds – organizational, functional, technological, and geographical – throughout a typical business prohibit the proper management of information, from creation through access. Silos must be bridged in order to keep pace with capacity demands and better align users with the information they need to get work done. Separate information silos also must be compliant, requiring their own set of information retention and availability processes, adding to the complexity of information management. These processes must be unified and automated to relieve users from managing information and yo streamline their access to information. Just as important, IT must be tightly aligned to the business and maintain that alignment in order to ensure smooth operation of processes that are essential to business success.

Customers have told us that the most pressing problem is not necessarily how to get aligned but how to maintain alignment – over the course of a project or in managing an ever-changing operational environment. HP provides visibility and control to information across every touchpoint and process to achieve alignment and maintain it on an ongoing basis. Without the built-in process best practices, this type of alignment is manual at best and, more likely, nonexistent.

For example, a specific corporate policy may require certain document types to be destroyed after three years. Yet that policy must be overridden when faced with a potential lawsuit involving documents that will expire before the subpoena is actually served. HP enables IT and Legal to be tightly aligned across retention processes that serve governance, compliance, and legal needs, and provides simple flexibility and control to change that corporate policy in a specific instance to do what’s right for the business.

By implementing a single information management platform across the entire enterprise, policies and processes are centrally managed and deployed, automatically integrating and consolidating the silos into a centralized archive – and eliminating the need for costly and error-prone duplication.

Gain competitive advantage by exploiting the value of your information.
When the infrastructure that supports the business is overtaxed, there’s little bandwidth to leverage the strength of business-critical applications, such as email, CRM, SCM, ERP, ECM and WCM for competitive advantage. Businesses must ensure that information is not only available, but that business users can get to it quickly. Inaccessible information prohibits service delivery, customer/employee satisfaction, and innovation. And when capacity on critical systems is freed up, the infrastructure can handle new volumes of information created by users and speed the process of accessing and analyzing business-critical information that will identify the next opportunities for growth.

HP’s approach to a single, highly scalable platform frees up capacity for your business-critical applications while centrally storing all information assets for easy access. This minimizes productivity loss and maximizes business efficiency. In fact, our platform may improve application performance ten-fold, giving organizations new-found capability to create information that serves the business.

Providing users with fast and secure access to all information and freeing them from the constraints that impede business allow them to be more productive and innovative. For example, if an enterprise could eliminate the requirement for restricted email inbox sizes, a massive productivity boost could be realized just from the time saved in managing inboxes. And by removing restrictions, users can freely exchange a virtually infinite number of messages and documents, across and outside the business, that can foster new ideas and satisfy customers.

The time is now to rethink information management.
The amount of information in any enterprise will never shrink, and its value will only increase. The search for a single solution that addresses all of an organization’s information management requirements must begin now. However, the criteria for selecting an information management solution must change to match what businesses face today, and enable them to grow, as needed, in the future. Businesses should consider a single, highly scalable archiving platform to centralize information retention, so they can accommodate today’s information volumes and handle its relentless growth.

They must adopt an approach to information management where everything is pre-integrated in a single platform for easy management, yet standards-based so it will fit into their existing environment, at minimal cost and with maximum utilization. The approach must accommodate every form of information critical to business, whether digital or printed. And it must incorporate industry best practices that allow IT to tightly align with the needs of the business while simplifying governance, compliance, discovery, and search.

Based on these criteria, HP becomes the clear choice. HP is the only company to deliver a single, scalable and fully integrated platform that meets your information management needs today while affording you the freedom to grow and easily adjust to changing requirements. Our solutions address a wide range of needs at every level, from enabling small-scale enterprises to get control of their email all the way up to helping the largest enterprises consolidate and centralize their growing silos of information.

Learn more about it.
For deeper insights into building the information management solution you need now, visit
www.hp.com/go/rethinkIM and register to receive the complimentary Enterprise Strategy Group white paper “HP’s Information Retention Strategy: Focus on Access, Scale, and Longevity.”

For more information about HP’s holistic approach to information management, and a full description of our easy-to-use, ready-to-grow platform and solutions, visit www.hp.com/go/software.

Source:
[1] “HP’s Information Retention Strategy: Focus on Access, Scale, and Longevity,” Brian Babineau, ESG, December 2007